


gutter credo

by quietmoon



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2020-06-30 11:06:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19851868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietmoon/pseuds/quietmoon
Summary: Every psychopath's gotta start somewhere.





	gutter credo

**Author's Note:**

> _cross-posted from[ff.net](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10775974/1/gutter-credo)_
> 
> **muse:** my love — sia  
>  **prompt:** i start a fight 'cause I need to feel something  
>  **notes:** (irrelevant...) if fairy tail is my lifeblood, then knb is probably my oxygen. just saying, (my twisted versions of) gajeel and akashi would be blood brothers.
> 
> _*lyrics from things that stop you dreaming—Passenger_

( dusk ) **  
****if you can't get what you love, you learn to love the things you've got**

He figures that if he were a clock, he'd be stuck perpetually chiming the eleventh hour — never getting to twelve, never finishing the cycle, jarred static in feasible desperation, always only waiting for the night to get darker.

However, there's certainly something intensely satisfying in repetition. As if making the same mistakes over and over offers him some chance in perfecting the flaws, until he can't tell them apart from what was there before — yes, there's definitely something in that.

After all, there's no-one who knows the darkness as well as he.

* * *

( twilight ) **  
if you can't be what you want, you learn to be the things you're not**

Seventy two days after Metallicana disappeared, Gajeel found Phantom Lord and met Jose. Seventy three days after he was abandoned, he experienced torture first-hand for the first time in his life.

They laughed at him. _'You eat metal, huh? Well, snack on this.'_ And after many, many, _many_ failed attempts, a child strapped to wall learned to catch flying knives with his teeth.

And they liked that.

So they asked him for more information about himself, and Gajeel told them about Metallicana, that absent good-for-nothing bastard, in a voice equally enthusiastic and bitter.

Of course, they didn't believe him.

And he learned a few more things on that first day at Phantom — like how to blink blood from his eyes, and how to send a blast of scrap metal howling from his mouth like a hurricane, and just how easily iron and steel can make a man scream.

* * *

( dawn ) **  
** **if you can't get what you need, you learn to need the things that stop you dreaming**

When he fought the Salamander, he noticed it for the first time.

Dragneel did not burn.

His magic afforded him a simultaneous immunity and affinity to fire, and the element didn't harm him in the slightest. He could literally sheath his body in raging flames, and only benefit as a result.

Gajeel… well, sure, it wouldn't take much effort to sheath his body in his own magic — but he wouldn't be doing himself any damn favours, let's put it that way.

And at that moment, seven years from when he locked memories of a gleaming steel dragon away, he wondered why his father only taught him magic that would make him bleed.


End file.
